In the News: Humble Pie, Books for Breakfast

Salman Rushdie has threatened legal action over a book written by his former bodyguard: “He is portraying me as mean, nasty, tight-fisted, arrogant and extremely unpleasant. In my humble opinion I am none of these.”

After reading a novel a day for three months, Louise Doughty, a judge for the Man Booker prize, feels “as though I have a large piece of blancmange where my brain should be.”

“Breaking Dawn,” the fourth book in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire series, sold an estimated 1.3 million copies in its first twenty-four hours.

The director of an Iranian publishing house has sent a letter to the country’s Minister of Culture suggesting that workers be required to read a book at the start of each day, to “replace the unflattering scene of them eating bread for breakfast at work.”

Acres of Books, the Long Beach, California, institution, will be closing its doors and liquidating its inventory of more than a million titles after seventy-four years in business.

Shah Muhammad Rais, the biggest bookseller in Afghanistan and the subject of “The Bookseller of Kabul,” has given up driving around the country in a bookmobile, and has turned to the Internet as a way of attracting new readers.